


vi. please...

by tempestaurora



Series: the kids aren't alright [whumptober 2020] [6]
Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Gen, Heart-to-Heart, Laundromats, Pre-Canon, Rated teen for swearing, Sibling Bonding, Whumptober
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-06
Updated: 2020-10-06
Packaged: 2021-03-08 01:47:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,931
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26857675
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tempestaurora/pseuds/tempestaurora
Summary: “You still, uh, playing violin?” Diego asked.“Hm? Yeah. Third chair at the Icarus,” she replied. She didn’t tell him that she’d recently auditioned for second and failed.“And I heard—heard you’re writing,” he said.Vanya swallowed and nodded. “Yeah. Guess so.”“Youguess?” Diego scoffed. “From what I hear, you’ve written a tell-all novel about our abusive childhood.”OR: Several months before Vanya's book is published, she goes to the local laundromat in the middle of the night. She doesn't expect her brother, one Diego Hargreeves, to walk in, too.
Relationships: Diego Hargreeves & Vanya Hargreeves
Series: the kids aren't alright [whumptober 2020] [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1930186
Comments: 34
Kudos: 189





	vi. please...

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt: "Stop, please."
> 
> firstly, this is probably my favourite fic of the month. i LOVE diego, i LOVE laundromat conversations at night time, and i just really enjoy how all of this turned out. every part of it i'm very proud of and i wish someone else had written it so i could read it for the first time.
> 
> secondly, it's not whumpy, really, or angsty, or anything like that, and i BARELY follow the prompt at all. i don't even know if the words "stop" or "please" even feature in it lmao. it's just a long over-due heart-to-heart. i hope you guys enjoy it

Vanya hadn’t planned on asking her siblings about her book. She hadn’t. She had written it all on a red, second-hand typewriter and had simply wallowed in the feeling of substance she received from doing so. She felt real for the first time in years.

_Extra-Ordinary,_ she titled it, because that was what her siblings were, and that’s what she was supposed to be, but had fallen short of. She’d been so hollow for so long, and though in the days after completing the manuscript, she’d fallen back into that familiar pattern, she couldn’t help what the book had made her feel.

Substantial, real, seen.

The publishers loved it, too.

_Extra-Ordinary: My Life as Number Seven_ was the first ever authorised in-depth look at the notorious Umbrella Academy. They’d been active from age eleven, in the year 2000, until the day Diego left the house when he was seventeen, in 2006. Between those dates were six years of missions, missing children, and murder. It contained Klaus, packing up the week after Ben died at the end of 2004, and Allison leaving for L.A. a few months later, with a gleam in her eye that said she was going to get everything she wanted. Five, of course, had vanished at age thirteen, and Luther had never left the house until 2014, when he was sent up to space.

Vanya had left the Umbrella Academy when she was eighteen, a year after Diego packed up, leaving Luther as the only person who could still go on missions, and becoming a solo act, rather than a chorus. Vanya had applied for music school, and taken her violin and gone; the only ordinary child in a family of superheroes and entirely unfamiliar with how friendship worked, with socialisation and affection and love.

And she wrote all about it in her book.

Her biography, her memoir. Everything Sir Reginald Hargreeves had put her through, everything her siblings had done, following his lead. She detailed the day Allison rumoured her into not playing the violin – it took three days before she returned and uncast her spell. She wrote all about Diego’s cruelty and Luther’s pride. She told the world of Klaus swiping her precious few possessions to pay for the weed he was buying from a guy round the corner, and all about Ben’s tendency to run into her and not apologise; how his usually soft words could come out so scathing.

She dedicated a chapter to him, though, to talk about his good parts; about the things she missed and how desperately she wanted him back. She did the same for Five, a few chapters earlier; her two brothers who’d vanished and never returned.

The publishers had salivated over those details – it had never been revealed until now how Ben had been killed, or why Number Five had vanished from the Academy. Nothing of the inside of the Hargreeves household had been revealed in decades, and now here it all was, written by the one person the world had never even known to exist.

So, she hadn’t planned on showing any of her siblings the manuscript. It was close to the last round of edits before it went to print, and she’d decided months before that they would just have to pick it up at a bookstore like everybody else.

She’d already received one angry voicemail from Allison when the marketing campaign began. Vanya wondered if she would’ve attempted to rumour her, had her powers ever worked over the phone. _I heard a rumour,_ Allison might’ve said, _that you kill the book before it ever goes to print._

Allison would’ve, she was sure.

But then she saw Diego in the laundromat.

It was three am, or thereabouts, and the laundromat was like a golden beacon in the dark blue of the night. Vanya, with a sack of clothes twisted in her fingers, stepped in by pressing the door open with her shoulder, and breathing in the scent of fabric softener. The radio played quietly overhead, and the only other person she could see was a young woman sitting atop an empty washing machine, reading a book.

Vanya didn’t make eye contact when the woman looked up; just trudged over to a machine and filled it, pressing her quarters into the coin slot and hitting the start button. She then lifted herself onto the next machine over and produced her laptop from the bottom of the laundry bag, ready to finally jump into the edits she’d been putting off. At this point, much of it was rewording or sourcing her information, and she was at least half way through her spin cycle when the door opened again.

She and the woman looked up in unison, to see the man who entered in black leathers, with arm guards and bracers filled with knives. Vanya wondered how someone might walk anywhere and be unassuming while wearing such an outfit, but Diego managed it. His usually sour expression was lifted as he tapped at his phone, holding a black bin bag of dirty laundry in his spare hand.

The other woman in the laundromat seemed a little on edge, but Vanya just watched him passively until he finally looked up from his phone and landed his gaze on her. His sigh was deep.

“Vanya,” he said.

“Diego,” she replied.

He trudged over, stuffing his phone in his pocket and opening up a machine a few down from where she sat. “Ain’t it a bit dangerous to be out alone at this time of night?”

“Oh, I’m sure you’d protect me if I got in any trouble,” she replied, dry.

He sent her a look before filling the machine. “I didn’t know you live around here.”

She hummed. “A block down, you?”

“By the gym that way,” he replied, nodding in the opposite direction she’d gestured. She vaguely knew of a seedy gym with a large boxing ring the way he pointed, and briefly pictured Diego training there in the middle of night. She didn’t realise she lived so close to her brother.

“You been out _vigilante-ing_?” she asked, absently saving the document.

He didn’t look amused by either the question or her continued effort to talk to him. “Sure have.”

“That’s good; otherwise I might start to think you dress like this normally.”

He didn’t honour her with a smile, just piled in the quarters and started the cycle on the machine.

“How have you been?” she asked, because the alternative was sitting in uncomfortable silence for the next hour.

“Oh, you know,” he replied, before jumping up onto the empty machine next to her. “I adopted a cat – I guess that’s news.”

“You adopted a cat?” As far as Vanya knew, Diego didn’t like pets at all.

“Yeah,” he said with a shrug. “Her name’s Flamethrower. I found her in the dumpster.”

“Oh, my God.”

Diego just shrugged again. “She’s cute, I guess. Wouldn’t need to even do a load so soon if she didn’t moult over everything, though,” he added, gesturing to the laundromat. “You still, uh, playing violin?”

“Hm? Yeah. Third chair at the Icarus,” she replied. She didn’t tell him that she’d recently auditioned for second and failed.

“And I heard—heard you’re writing,” he said.

Vanya swallowed and nodded. “Yeah. Guess so.”

“You _guess?_ ” Diego scoffed. “From what I hear, you’ve written a tell-all novel about our abusive childhood.”

Vanya nodded again. “You know, the world didn’t even understand why Five was gone? Dad never explained it.”

It was probably a cheap trick to divert him from the subject like that, but Diego played along, letting his features soften for the thought of their thirteen-year-old brother who vanished into thin air.

“So, what? You try to give Five a legacy fifteen years after he disappears?”

Vanya shrugged. “It’s about me, too. No one even knew I _existed._ I want—I want people to know that I was there. That I was going through it all too, but—”

“You weren’t going through the same shit as us, V,” Diego interrupted. “You didn’t go on the missions, you didn’t see Ben d-die, you didn’t have the same pressure on your shoulders.”

“Well, sure, but I didn’t have any friends, either,” she retorted. “And I didn’t have anyone to talk to, and I was isolated and ignored by _everyone_ in that household, so—”

“You were not—”

“Diego!” she cried. The woman looked up from her book across the laundromat. Vanya lowered her voice. “I _know_ what I went through, you don’t get to say I didn’t experience any of it. Because I did. And yeah, it was different from what you went through – I was never pitted against my own siblings and forced into a rivalry for top spot like you were. And I—I never struggled with a stutter, or was repeatedly drowned to learn how to hold my breath longer—” Diego grumbled something unintelligible. “But I remember being your target, Diego. Do you? When Dad called me down from my violin lessons to put on a Kevlar vest and run around as you _threw knives at me?_ ”

“That was Five,” Diego said.

“That was Five only after he took my place when you kept _hitting_ ,” Vanya replied. Diego’s jaw locked. “And then after Five left, Luther took on that role out of _pity_ for me. Because Dad had somehow drilled it into his head that I needed to be protected—”

“You were the only one without powers.”

“And yet he had you throw _knives_ at me.”

The two of them stared at each other for far too long before Diego huffed and flopped back against the wall.

“Sounds like you’re about to give us all a public dressing-down,” he said.

Vanya shrugged. “Maybe you guys deserve one.”

He rolled his eyes. “You said it yourself, Vanya, we went through shit, too. Yeah, maybe we were terrible to you – maybe I was worse than the others – but that didn’t come out of nowhere. We’re all assholes, you included, but when you’re telling the whole world about how shitty we were to you, you better at least stop to consider what cards we were being dealt, too.”

Vanya bit her tongue, and Diego took the opportunity to continue. “Take Ben, for example.” She winced automatically – was it a cheap hit of mentioning one dead brother to combat her cheap hit of the missing one? “He hated his powers. He had a fucking portal in his chest with a goddamn eldritch nightmare in there. You know what we did on missions? We did exactly what Dad told us to, shut him in a room with the bulk of the bad guys, and listened as he tore them all to shreds. Ben – who was, was soft, and kind, and _good._ He left every mission _drenched_ in blood, and the media still adored him. So, maybe he was mean to you – maybe he called you names and burnt ants in the courtyard while you cried—” that was a memory she hadn’t detailed in the book, but she remembered it clear as day, “—or wouldn’t let you hang out with him in free hours or what-the-fuck-ever, but did you ever consider that he was in a literal eternal nightmare? That while you were out there begging for powers, he was desperately wishing to be rid of his?”

Vanya swallowed and looked down at her laptop, at the open manuscript document.

“Maybe Allison was fucking manipulative and selfish, and maybe I was the biggest asshole on the planet – but did you ever stop to think _why?_ Think about what we were dealing with while you were hidden in your room, playing violin ten hours a day? You never witnessed one of my drownings, you don’t know how many times Dad pulled Klaus out of bed in the middle of the night to shove him in the mausoleum until sunrise. Or Five getting the harshest punishments because he was the smartest, or Luther getting the blame for everything because he was the leader. We were _all_ struggling, Vanya, and if your book doesn’t at least _allow_ that to exist in the narrative of our family,” he pointed an accusing finger at her laptop, “then maybe the book is not worth writing.”

They stared at each other again, until Vanya ducked out of his gaze. The woman across the room was clearly listening to them fight, but Vanya couldn’t bring herself to care. Maybe Diego was right. She’d dedicated entire chapters to Five and Ben to explore their positive sides – what, out of _respect for the dead?_ Where was her respect for the living? For the siblings who hadn’t respected her, but were still out there, dealing with the shit that Dad put them through, just like her?

She wouldn’t take out the bad things they’d done; she refused. But would it be so bad to mention the good parts? To write about Luther’s earnest nature, or Allison’s drive and ambition? To mention Klaus’ humour, his easy affection, rather than focusing on his indifference and addiction to keep him numb from his powers and his feelings? To talk about Diego and his relationship with Mom, his loyalty and occasional, earned softness?

Did they not grow up in the same house as her? Under the same thumb of a shitty, manipulative bastard of a father? Did they not grow lopsided because of it? Maybe not exactly like she did, but in a similar way that stunted their emotions, their feelings, their thoughts?

Vanya looked over at Diego. She said, “You’re right,” and he raised his eyebrows with a surprised blink.

“I am?”

“Yeah, you are. I think, anyway. The existence of my trauma being at the hands of my father and siblings doesn’t discount the fact that my siblings had trauma at the hands of my father, too.”

Diego blinked, then said, “R-right. Yeah. Exactly.”

“I’m going to write this book, Diego. It’s gonna get published, and people will know that the Umbrella Academy didn’t just stop at six. Number Seven _existed._ But so did numbers One to Six – you guys all had your own lives that I didn’t even know about. You know, I didn’t know about Luther and Allison’s— _thing_ —until Klaus told me when he came back to the house a few months before I moved out to steal fancy cutlery.” Diego snorted. “I don’t know what was going on with any of you beyond what I got to see.”

“Maybe if you asked your siblings,” Diego suggested, “you’d find out.”

Vanya considered him for a moment. Diego who had only been unkind to her in childhood, but was a good decade out from the last time he’d lived under the same roof as her. Diego who had been a complete mama’s boy, who’d helped Mom and Vanya bake in the kitchen on occasion, and taught Vanya the proper way to hold the cutting knives. Diego who had left in a mess, screaming and hollering at his father who didn’t care to listen, distraught after another mission had ended in injury because there were only two students left in the Academy, and fighting was a lot harder when those two students couldn’t stand to be in the same room.

Diego was different from the last time she’d known him. She could see it in the vigilante get up – still a hero at heart, still desperate to protect – in the cat he’d saved from the dumpster, in the way he looked so honest, so real as he reminded her of his own past.

“Please… Vanya,” he sighed. “Just think about it.”

She wondered if he’d ever felt that substantial feeling of being _real._

“Do you wanna get coffee?” she asked, surprising him again. “Tomorrow? Or, uh, today?”

Diego’s mouth twisted. “I think I’m gonna be asleep most of the day at this rate.”

She nodded. “I’m a night owl. Do you wanna get coffee after this?” She rapped her knuckles against the washing machine.

Diego’s face pulled into something like a smile. “Sure,” he said. “Though I gotta feed Flamethrower at some point.”

Vanya nodded. “That’s fine. I just—I wanna do it right. I don’t want to write a book of cheap shots against my family, you know?”

“Yeah, V, I know.” He paused, then pointed at her laptop. “Is that it?”

“Yeah. But I don’t think you want to read this.”

“No?”

“It’s nowhere near ready yet.”

They talked through the wash and dry cycles, got shitty coffee at the all-night place down the road, and met Flamethrower in the back room of the seedy gym where Diego both worked and lived. It wasn’t like when they were kids – Vanya had grown a spine and Diego had shed much of the anger he used to wear as a second skin. They fit together better, this way; all their hard edges didn’t align exactly right, but close enough that they could bridge the gap if they made the effort.

So, Vanya called the publishers and the book got pushed back a few months, and the media questioned if Vanya was backing down or just warming up for a bigger story, when in reality she was sitting on Diego’s shitty, ugly couch, with his terror of a cat on her lap, watching him cheat at darts and waiting for the day that the announcement would be made:

_Extra-Ordinary: of Knives and Violins, The Story of The Umbrella Academy_ by Vanya and Diego Hargreeves.

In the end, she was glad they shared a laundromat.

**Author's Note:**

> vanya is given the love and appreciation she has always desired from diego and because of this, he has her back when their father dies and she knows she can trust him when it comes to leonard and her powers and finding out what allison did to her, so she never ends up ending the world (but reginald is still dead because lmao sucks for him)
> 
> (also idk how but eudora lives)
> 
> THANK U FOR READING!! for real, this is my favourite fic of the month (that i remember). pretty please talk to me in the comments about it
> 
> tomorrow(!!): five, delores, and some family bonding


End file.
